EAST RUTHERFORD, N.J. — When the end was near, when Lionel Hollins could no longer continue a tradition, decades long, of talking basketball with Jack Ramsay, he still made calls to the old coach in South Florida. A friend of Ramsay’s would answer the phone and ask him to record a message.

In the last one, a day or two before Ramsay died in April at age 89 after a long struggle with cancer, Hollins got right to the point.

“I love you,” he said. “You were a father figure for me, much more than a coach.”

With the NBA regular season upon us, let us note that Derek Fisher, the New York Knicks’ new coach, is not the only one in town extending a legacy, from Red Holzman to Phil Jackson to him. In Brooklyn, where Hollins has replaced Jason Kidd as coach of the Nets, he brings a vintage stamp, too, as a disciple of Ramsay, or Dr. Jack, a Hall of Famer who coached in the NBA for 21 years.

As a starter on Ramsay’s championship Portland Trail Blazers in 1977, Hollins — like Fisher, a southpaw — led a group of swift guards. Bill Walton triggered fast breaks with textbook outlet passes. Maurice Lucas provided the muscle. Ramsay’s Blazers were the old (1970s) Knicks of the Great Northwest, another quintessential unit working, it seemed, telepathically.

“We had very skilled players who understood how to pass, when to pass and who were willing to pass,” said Hollins, 61, whose Nets will open the season tonight in Boston. “Jack Ramsay was just a great orchestrator, and I think our team for him was the perfect storm, the perfect team.”

Holzman and Ramsay, longtime admirers of each other, are gone now. The old Knicks lost their power forward, Dave DeBusschere, 11 years ago at age 62, and his Blazers counterpart, Lucas, died even younger, at 58, in 2010.

Hollins recently flew to Portland for Lucas’ foundation dinner. Walton was there. So were former Blazers Lloyd Neal and Bob Gross.

“When we all see each other, there’s no get-to-know again, never have to get reacquainted,” Hollins said. “What we had we had, and we knew it and it never ends.”

In conversation, Hollins gives the impression of a self-assured man, trying to sell only the ideals of collectivism and effort. He promised to do no preaching to the Nets about his championship past.

“I don’t like to get into the we-did stuff because this is their time,” he said. “It’s not about me, about what I did when I played. I don’t even like to talk about Memphis with them.”

Such recent history his players should know, how Hollins took a long-moribund Memphis team and coached it to the Western Conference finals in 2013, only to be let go in a decision related to organizational finances and philosophy.

“You go through the whole gamut of depression, anger, hurt,” he said. “Then you come to grips with it: I did all I could do. That was their decision; had nothing to do with me.”

Hollins was a candidate for the Los Angeles Clippers job until Doc Rivers shook loose from Boston. He sat out a season, and he stayed in touch with Ramsay, whom he would visit in Florida, waking early for breakfast and hours of basketball talk.

On the day of Ramsay’s funeral last spring, Hollins was interviewing for the Minnesota job. He debated whether he should postpone the meeting, board a Florida flight. He did not, and during his recent Portland visit he and his former teammates discussed how none of them had attended the funeral, given how spread far and wide they were, how long Ramsay had battled the disease and how many times they had told him how much he had meant to them.

“It was all so unreal that he was gone,” Hollins said. “He knew how we felt.”

In Hollins’ case, he had delivered his last phone message, thanked Ramsay for being the kind of male role model he so lacked as a child of a broken and impoverished home.

The best way to celebrate Ramsay, Hollins thought, was to get another job and to pass along “life lessons that helped me become successful,” the belief that some life mentoring must be part of the coach’s job description because players “live in such an insulated world” and many will never grow up.